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8/ Even better, the box-cost as a proxy for transaction costs actually captures a lot of illegible tx costs beyond explicit Coase ones
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9/ Box-cost includes, besides search/negotiation/monitoring costs, such intangibles as memetic socialization, pricing psychology etc etc
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10/ Okay, all this is a set up for what I actually want to talk: organizations. These things are *primarily* boxes. They're like Coke/Pepsi
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11/ About 150 years ago, if you wanted to drive societal change through institutions, you'd fund things like universities: "mission boxes"
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12/ The boxes got smaller and smaller. Institutional ambitions went from nation-state level to university level, to lab level
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13/ At some point, rather than get smaller, institutional ambitions began manifesting in unboxed forms and calling themselves "networks"
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14/ Institutional forms didn't suddenly "discover" networks as an organizing structure. They merely unboxed them and allowed them to connect
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15/ Example: founders of w00w00, the hacker collective, cited Xerox PARC as an inspiration. PARC was a network in a leaky box, w00w00=no box
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17/ Unlike unbundling/rebundling of content/functionality, which is relatively lossless, unboxing/reboxing tends to be extremely lossy
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18/ Some "box" functions migrate to interior. Bibliographic references of books turn into hot links inside the text. Indices become search.
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Replying to
20/ One sign is shifting patterns in institutional funding. Unboxing is often accompanied by big cost reductions. Not all is wastecutting
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21/ When you fund a project instead of an institution that will undertake the project, for instance, you make it less sustainable
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